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Since its inception the United States has sent envoys to advance American interests abroad, both across oceans and to areas that later became part of the country. Little has been known about these first envoys until now. From China to Chile, Tripoli to Tahiti, Mexico to Muscat, Peter D. Eicher chronicles the experience of the first American envoys in foreign lands. Their stories, often stranger than fiction, are replete with intrigues, revolutions, riots, war, shipwrecks, swashbucklers, desperadoes, and bootleggers. The circumstances the diplomats faced were precursors to today’s headlines: Americans at war in the Middle East, intervention in Latin America, pirates off Africa, trade defici...
This definitive study of the U.S. Consular Service examines its history from the Revolutionary War until its integration with the Foreign Service in 1924. As a British colony, Americans relied on the British consular system to take care of their sailors and merchants. But after the Revolution they scrambled to create an American service. While the American diplomatic establishment was confined to the world’s major capitals, U.S. consular posts proliferated to most of the major ports where the expanding American merchant marine called. Mostly untrained political appointees, each consul was a lonely individual relying on his native wits to provide help to distressed Americans. Appointments w...
This reference history describes and analyzes the State Department and Foreign Service of the United States. It also outlines the history of three major State Department functions, namely, the treatymaking process and record, representation in international conferences, and participation in international organizations and other agencies. The volume covers more than two centuries—from the genesis of American diplomacy to the 1990s. Unlike other works, this volume deals with such matters as departmental organization and management; personnel and staffing; administrative practices, reform, and reorganization; and the Department's operations, functions, principal and other officers, and problems. The volume consists of eight chapters, extensively footnoted, each of which focuses on successive periods grouped in four major historical eras. Tables are designed to serve as further reference for long-range historical analysis and exploration. The book is supplemented with three appendixes and a comprehensive bibliography. A complete and up-to-date major reference, this will be an asset to the reference collections of both academic and public libraries.